One of the underlying reasons for this genocide? It is an acting out, a catharsis.
In these scenes, Palestinians are the ultimate objects
Anthony Shorr, in his 1991 work Human Destructiveness (p. 18), revealed the following:
The First World War may have influenced [Sigmund] Freud in finally accepting the idea that aggression is independent of sex. His first full acknowledgment of this appears in his speculative paper Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which was not published until 1920. Freud observed that patients suffering from traumatic neuroses brought on by accidents or shock often had dreams in which the unpleasant event was repeated in undisguised form. He also noted that small children tended to repeat unpleasant experiences, such as the departure of a parent, by making them into a repetitive game. In both instances, repetition of intrinsically unpleasant events appeared to contravene the pleasure principle, that is, the idea that human behavior is primarily governed by the desire to obtain pleasure and to avoid pain.
Why would anyone want to recall and repeat an unpleasant experience? Freud thought that another principle must be at work. He concluded that both neurotics who had been exposed to trauma and children who had been exposed to distress were attempting to master their experiences by repeating them in dream and play. In fact, this tendency to repeat traumatic events in order to come to terms with them is not confined to dreams and childhood games. We must all have encountered friends who, after some loss or shock, feel compelled to tell the story of their misadventure at every opportunity until the incident eventually loses its emotional charge.
It’s important to note that the recent episode of the Two Nice Jewish Boys podcast, where the hosts describe their desire to obliterate all Palestinian people from the surface of the earth, found the hosts laughing. This laughter had the effect of attempting to minimize their sadism, as well as normalizing their behavior (they made mention several times that what they were expressing was broadly held as opinion in Israeli culture).
But laughter denotes an aspect of play. There was something jovial in their murderous contemplation.
Eytan Weinstein, host: Just ’cause we’re looking for international legitimacy. No one actually gives a shit — zero people in Israel, if you go up to them and you’re like, “Do you — do you want, do you care if this baby in Gaza gets polio?” They’ll be like, “I don’t fucking care.” … They’ll be like, “Leave me alone, I’m trying to buy ice for Shabbat. Fuck off. I don’t care about these guys.”
Naor Meninger, co-host: Also, as long as they’re in the Nakba state in their tents, you know, and we’re living still, like — you know, if you put aside the news, day to day, it’s okay. Yesterday, we went to a concert, we had lots of fun, me and my girlfriend. And we danced, and it was amazing, and you can’t help but think, like, “It’s nice to know that you’re dancing in a concert while hundreds of thousands of Gazans are homeless.” You know, sitting in a tent and getting polio.
Weinstein: It makes it even better!
Meninger: Yeah, more enjoyable concert.
Weinstein: If only they’d put live footage of Gaza…. That’s what people don’t understand. Look, like, I know that you guys might be appalled by this, some of the listeners. But seriously, this is how Israelis feel… you might think I’m extreme. But I have conversations with lots of people — coworkers, friends — people enjoy knowing that they are suffering.
Weinstein, later in the podcast: So these soldier guards in the prison camp, there were allegations that they sodomized October 7th terrorists. They put things up their butt. And there was apparently video that came out this week… What’s amazing to me is the fact that the Left is treating these situations — let’s take it at face value. Let’s say some prisoner guards, soldiers, took a big, sharp —
Meninger: Scythe.
Weinstein: — porcupine dildo with barbed wire around it and shoved it up this guy’s ass. Are you really going to play the “oh poor guy” card? “How could we do this”? That’s a fraction of what the person deserves. Seriously! Like, where is your morality?
Weinstein: If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza — every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow? I would press it in a second. That’s just what I think. I think most Israelis, that’s the choice. Even if it’s not right now, I would press it right now. [makes gesture of pushing a button on the table]
Meninger: The same with the territories.
Weinstein: Give me that button! I’ll press it right now. [laughs] And I think most Israelis would.
Meninger: Yeah. Most Jewish Israelis.
Weinstein: They wouldn’t post — they wouldn’t talk about it like I am. They wouldn’t say, “I pressed it.” But they would press it, right!? Like, if they were in a closet alone, they wouldn’t even hesitate. Someone came to them in the dark and said, “No one will know. You press this: all the Palestinians are gone.” You’d be like — [stabs imaginary button]
Meninger laughs.
Weinstein: — “Is there another one?”
Laughter, too, featured in the response of counter-protesters at the University of Michigan, where anti-war protesters were holding a die-in and consequently were brutalized by police breaking up their demonstration.
The counter-protesters, holding Israeli and American flags, found the abuse by the police to be a source of mirth and hilarity. They were transformed into an audience, and in that way the officers’ violence became their entertainment.
Also I was recently reminded of notorious photos from Abu Ghraib. Two Americans, Charles Graner and Sabrina Harman, stood over a human pile of naked male Iraqi prisoners, and the two showed thumbs up and bright smiles. This, too, was a form of play, a form of mastery.
What Storr says above is that those who undergo trauma internalize it and transform it, so that they can emerge victorious by coming to grips with it.
Today, I saw a Due Dissidence podcast where one host remarked that the founding story of the state of Israel was the Holocaust — which is truly dire, when one thinks of this. (Not dire in the sense of the scope and scale of the Holocaust itself and its destruction, as that is more a tale of the depravity of the society and culture of Nazi Germany and the absolute depths to which humanity can descend. That’s almost impossible to put into words.) Here I speak of setting the Holocaust as one’s founding myth, legend or story, which is bound to have reverberating effects as themes resound through time, doubling and trebling upon themselves.
The trauma of the Holocaust is impossible to conceive in our modern imagination. Yet this is the foundational story for the nation-state of Israel. One cannot escape the trauma that is embedded in that story. Thus, for the citizens of that nation-state, how can they come to grips with it? They must “attempt to master their experiences by repeating them in dream and play.”
Thus they stand over Palestinians as American soldiers did to Iraqis at Abu Ghraib.
They anally penetrate Palestinians with assault rifles. They rape Palestinians to death. Then a broadcast celebrates the assailant, and a rabbi imparts a blessing upon the rapist, to show how this is sanctioned by the society as being upright, something entirely acceptable.
We know that the Nazis perpetrated a genocide upon the Jewish people in their midst. The Nazis targeted others, too, but no others were able to emigrate and found their own state. And in the middle of that state were people who already were on the land, providing just the local population that could allow these erstwhile European Jewish people to expiate their trauma, act it out, expel it upon somebody else so that they could master their past, their present, their fate.
Knowing that the Nazis perpetrated a genocide, and knowing that those who are traumatized have a tendency, even a need, to repeat their experiences so as to surmount them, it should be perfectly obvious and indisputable that what we’re seeing in Gaza is a genocide. It’s the genocide that the Israelis need to perpetrate, if Freud was right.
Even at this late date, we have an obligation to stop them.
This is so sick and while this might be or evenly could likely be the reason we see what we see, I hope it is not. Although, whatever the explanation turns out to be most accurate, it is disgusting. Is there some privileged comfort in keeping such vile acts, in the incomprehensible category? Maybe. I think in one way, I do not want to understand the why. I just want it to stop.
I can’t stand the sight of their ugly faces!